Category Archives: Culture

The New Bull Connor

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For a long time, Bull Connor was the symbol of southern racism, because he famously used fire hoses and dogs on civil rights agitators in Birmingham Alabama. Like most white people in the 60’s, he opposed the idea of racial integration, but it was his way of doing it that got him labeled as the ultimate racist. It was one thing to believe that integration was a terrible idea. It was another to take pleasure in a hatred of blacks for no other reason than their race. Hatred, even of that which should be hated, always has an ugliness to it.

Today, the ugly face of racial hatred is directed at whites and worn by social justice warriors, claiming to be fighting white supremacy. In reality they are just anti-white bigots who compete with one another over how much they hate white people. One difference between the anti-white bigots of today and guys like Bull Connor is he was happy to live his life in obscurity. He never set out to be a famous racist. Today’s social justice warriors see racial hatred as a path to fame and glory. It’s the easy way into the high culture.

An example of this is Brandeis associate professor Dorothy Kim. She is someone passing herself off as a medievalist. In reality, she is a white-hating bigot and a social justice warrior, who lives to harass white people. Her current crusade is an attack on Rachel Fulton Brown, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago. Kim’s reason for attacking Dr. Brown is that she is a conservative white women, who does real scholarship, rather than agitate for nutty causes. Kim thinks she can get ahead by hating the white woman.

Rachel Fulton Brown is a serious scholar who has written award winning books on arcane medieval topics. She has written this book and this book. Even if you are a fan of medieval European history, these are esoteric subjects, but that’s how the stock of knowledge is developed and expanded. Dorothy Kim is a ridiculous person who writes nonsense like this. The only people talking about white supremacy are liars and lunatics. It does not matter which applies here, either should be disqualifying for an academic in civil society.

Dorothy Kim is not just focusing her attention on Rachel Brown. Kim is an all purpose white-hater who whores herself out to the daffy girls of Progressive media, hired to popularize academic racism. Not content with attacking white people in real-time, the social justice warriors are now determined to rewrite history to make Henry VIII into soul brother number one. In that Daily Beast post, Mx. Kim goes out of her way to fall for the Cheddar Man hoax, suggesting she is dumber than her sparse work product suggests.

That’s just the thing about the people like Mx. Kim. They are not just content to publicly attack white people for being white. There’s a suicidal nihilism to the modern racist. Their project is as much about decreasing the stock of human knowledge as it is chasing white people from the white societies that welcomed them. What’s offensive about Mx. Kim is not that she does not know things, it’s that she knows wrong things and demands that the rest of us, as a matter of social justice, accept falsehoods as fact, fiction as truth.

That’s another thing you see with the social justice warriors. They seek to replace accomplishment with moral fanaticism. Rachel Brown has reached her status by a long career of being good at her specialty. Mx. Kim is just not bright enough or willing to do the work, so she is attacking white people, in order to establish her bona fides as a culture warrior. Everything about Mx. Kim’s career to this point is a claim that she is a victim, by virtue of her DNA, and therefore must get free stuff from white people or else racism.

That’s why these people are so vicious. Being a virtue signalling loon is a highly competitive racket. There’s always someone out there preparing a nuttier claim than the most nutty claim of the moment. Because the ideology of the social justice warrior is completely empty, a pure negative ideology, the result is a version of the mob screaming “Goldstein” in 1984. It’s not enough to hate white people. What matters is that you are seen hating whitey and doing so with an enthusiasm that is without rival.

That is the ugliness that Mx. Kim shares with classic racists like Bull Connor from half a century ago. It was not that he opposed integration that made him ugly. It was that he was willing to abandon decency and order in his opposition to it. The willingness to sacrifice everything for a principle is fanaticism and it is just as much an enemy of civil society as the barbarian. That’s what you see with people like Mx. Kim. She is a fanatic, ready to burn it all down in the name of social justice. There’s nothing uglier than a fanatic.

Addendum: A commenter asked how people like Mx. Kim get into the academy. The reason the social justice warrior has success is that Progressives are always fighting themselves. By that, I mean they are are always at war with that which they fear about themselves or that which they are currently doing. The Left’s rage against Russian meddling corresponds with their own collaboration with Russian oligarchs in an effort to rig recent elections. Google the phrase “Opposite Rule Of Liberalism.”

In the case of the academy, the people hooting about racism and white supremacy are relying on the innate racism of the modern academy. “Oh look! We have an Asian applicant in medieval European studies!” The white liberals in the field are so desperate for multicultural status points, they fall all over themselves to find and embrace non-whites, purely on racial grounds. They embrace anti-racism, because they hate their own racism and the result is more of the self-loathing that drives the Progressive.

Multiculturalism has created a vast market for dull-witted grifters like Mx. Kim. She gets the attention that women naturally crave, but she gets to make a career out of it, thus making herself both a hero of feminism and multiculturalism. Her choice was working in a cubicle somewhere as a clerk or going into the promising world of social justice. it’s not hard to see why she chose to be a SJW. It’s also easy to see why she is so bitter and nasty. At some level, she knows she is a fraud and she hates herself even more.

Feudalism.Net

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There are certain words and phrases that have no fixed definition, so the use of them usually says more about the person using them, than the object they are being used to describe. Like “fascism” in modern times, the term “feudalism” was mostly a term of disparagement in the 18th and 19th century. According to scholars of the subject, the word “feudal” was first used in the 17th century, as in feudal order. It later came into more common usage in Marxist political propaganda in the 18th and 19th century.

Just because feudalism was largely used as a meaningless epithet, it does not mean it did not exist. Scholars generally agree that feudalism was “a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs.” The lord owned the land, the vassal was granted use of it by the lord. The land was the fief. In exchange for legal and physical protection, the lord expected service, usually military service, but also food rents and labor from the peasants.

Marxists later pointed out that the codes and customs that we associate with this period relied on the lord owning the one thing of value, the land. The person at the top of the feudal order had a monopoly on the one store of value and that gave him a monopoly on the law. The old saying about the golden rule is true. The man with the gold makes the rules. This is why as coinage made a comeback in the medieval period, kings took control of the mints. It was both a source a wealth, seigniorage, and a source of power.

A useful example of this is the decision by Henry VIII to dissolve the monasteries of the Catholic Church. By seizing church lands, which constituted about a quarter of the national wealth, and redistributing them to favored aristocrats, Henry fundamentally altered English society. He weakened the power of the old nobles, by filling their ranks with new members loyal to Henry. He also eliminated an alternative source of economic power in English society. Henry was supreme power because he controlled the land.

Feudalism only works when a small elite controls the source of wealth. Then they can control the exploitation of it. In Europe, as Christianity spread, the Church required lands, becoming one of the most powerful forces in society. The warrior elite was exclusively Catholic, thus they had a loyalty to the Pope, as God’s representative on earth. Therefore, the system of controlling wealth not only had a direct financial benefit to the people at the top, it had the blessing of God’s representative, who sat atop the whole system.

That’s something to keep in mind as we see technology evolve into a feudal system, where a small elite controls the resources and grants permission to users. The software oligopolies are now shifting all of their licencing to a subscription model. It’s not just the mobile platforms. Developers of enterprise software for business are adopting the same model. The users have no ownership rights. Instead they are renters, subject to terms and conditions imposed by the developer or platform holder. The users is literally a tenant.

The main reason developers are shifting to this model is that they cannot charge high fees for their software, due to the mass of software on the market. Competition has drive down prices. Further, customers are not inclined to pay high maintenance fees, when they can buy new systems at competitive rates. The solution is stop selling the stuff and start renting it. This fits the oligopoly scheme as it ultimately puts them in control of the developers. Apple and Google are now running protection rackets for developers.

It also means the end of any useful development. Take a look at the situation Stefan Molyneux faces. A band of religious fanatics has declared him a heretic and wants him burned. The Great Church of Technology is now in the process of having him expelled from the internet. As he wrote in a post, he invests 12 years building his business on-line, only to find out he owns none of it. He was always just a tenant farmer, who foolishly invested millions in YouTube. Like a peasant, he is now about to be evicted.

How long before someone like this monster discovers that Google and Apple will no longer allow him to use any apps on his phone? Or maybe he is denied access to his accounting system? How long before his insurer cuts off his business insurance, claiming the threat from homosexual terrorists poses too high of a risk? Federal law prevents the electric company from shutting off his power due to politics, but Federal law used to prevent secret courts and secret warrants. Things change as the people in charge change.

The power of the church in medieval Europe was not just spiritual. They owned vast amounts of land and could marshal tremendous resources in support of or in defiance of the secular rulers. In fact, the reason the Church acquired lands was for exactly that reason. What drives the tech overlords of today is exactly the same thing. Their desire to impose their moral order on the rest of us is driving them to monopolize the source of power in the information age. They are imposing a new form of feudalism on us.

The difference today is that this new religion is ill-defined and lacking in the outward symbols to distinguish it from the rest of society. The rules of the new religion are always changing, making it impossible to predict. No one in the 12th century was unclear about who set the moral order. The local bishop may have been nuts, but he was predictably nuts. The new religion is formless, with moral codes springing from the mob, as the mood of the mob changes. It’s an anarcho-tyranny, because it is an anarcho-religion.

The solution to this will not be the same as last time. There is no secular authority willing to challenge the power of the new theogarchs. Mark Zuckerberg went to Congress and lied his face off, knowing they were afraid to lay a hand on him. By the 2020 election, social media will have banned Trump and all Trump supporters. The solution, in time, is the people in these oligopolies will have to fear the peasantry in real space. The same civil authorities that are too weak to oppose the theogarchs will be too weak to protect them.

Peisistratos

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In the late 7th and early 6th century BC, ancient Athens fell into crisis. As is often the case with the classical period, historians disagree about the particular causes. One issue upon which everyone agrees is that economics played a part. The wealthy families had become an oligarchy, owning the majority of the land. Debt-bondage was common in the classical period. The collateral for loans in that age was the person. This meant that if the Athenian tenant farmers did not pay their rents, they and their children could be seized as slaves.

The way it worked is the farmer would borrow to finance the operations of the farm. If the farm did not produce enough to pay the debt , he would fall into debt bondage. In theory, he literally worked off his debt, so it was a temporary status. There was a special status in the law for someone in bondage for a debt, versus the normal type of slave. The reality at this time was that debt bondage was becoming a permanent state for a large fraction of the population. The result was increasing social strife between the classes.

Rivalry between the leading families was also a problem. As is always the case when there is social unrest, some factions tried to take advantage of it and gain power for themselves at the expense of their rivals. An Athenian nobleman named Cylon, made an unsuccessful attempt to seize power in Athens in 632 BC. Many Greek city-states had seen opportunistic noblemen take power on behalf of sectional interests. Factions sought to gain control of the state, in order to gain an edge over rivals.

There were also regional rivalries that exacerbated the personal and economic turmoils of the age. The rural population had different interests than the urban population. Traders had different interests than farmers. Since most Athenians lived in rural settlements, and debt bondage was an increasing problem, Attika was increasingly resembling Sparta, where a small elite ruled over a large population of helots. This exacerbated the personal and economic rivalries convulsing Athens at the time.

Regardless of the causes, Athens was at a crisis point and fear of a tyrant rising up to impose order, led the Athenians to turn to the wisest man in Athens. That man was Solon, a statesman, lawmaker and poet. He was of noble birth, but he was sometimes described as a self-made man, suggesting his family was of modest means. In 595 BC Solon had led the Athenian forces against the Megarians, resulting in a heroic victory. Allegedly, it was the power of his poetry that inspired the Athenians to carry the day.

By the time the Athenians turned to Solon, he was rich, a famous poet and a famous military leader. Solon was awarded temporary autocratic powers by Athenian citizens on the grounds that he had the “wisdom” to sort out their differences for them in a peaceful and equitable manner. His task was to find a way to resolve the factional rivalries. The result was a series of economic, legal and moral reforms that are remembered to this day as the Reforms of Solon. Once instituted, Solon gave up his position and left Athens.

The Athenians agreed to abide by these reforms for a period of ten years, but within a few years the old problems and rivalries were back. In addition to the old problems, the defects in the reforms created new problems. Some officials refused to perform their duties as described, while other posts were left vacant. The reforms worked as long as Solon was around to to lend his name to them. Once Solon was gone, the result was worse than before the reforms. As a result, the people blamed Solon for the break down of order.

Eventually one of Solon’s relatives, Peisistratos, ended the factionalism by force, becoming tyrant and confirming what everyone feared would happen prior to Solon’s reforms. Solon was still alive and he mocked the Athenians for allowing Peisistratos to seize power, by standing outside his home, wearing his uniform. Despite being driven into exile twice, Peisistratos was eventually able to impose order on Athens and he ruled as tyrant until his death. His sons succeeded him and ruled until 510 BC.

Solon gets positive treatment from history for having tried to preserve Athenian democracy and for having some success at curbing the power of the aristocrats. On the other hand, Aristotle credited Peisistratos with laying the foundation for the eventual rise of Athens. He changed the economy to be based on trade and he reformed agriculture, away from grains to olives. He did this by offering loans to farmers so they could make the transition. He also built a water system capable of sustaining a large population.

The lesson here is that reform is rarely successful, unless it is imposed by force. The reason is the status quo will always be preferable to those in power. Any reform through mutual consent must involved trade-offs that do nothing to alter the fundamental power arrangements. That was the defect of Solon’s reforms. While they temporarily alleviated the results of the power arrangements in Athenian society, they never attempted to alter them. The result of Solon’s reforms was nothing more than a pause in the factionalism.

This is something to keep in mind in the current age. The problems we see are not caused by errors in voting or mistakes in public policy. There is an underlying systemic problem that cannot be voted away. At the end of the Industrial Revolution, similar problems existed, but the political class was strong enough to impose reforms on the industrial barons and alter the power relationships in American society. That was possible because politics was a power center, one with the monopoly on violence.

Today, the political class is composed entirely of hired men, speaking on behalf of the interests that back their political careers. In fact, most are just actors, hired because they fit the right profile and look good on television. They have no power. This is the problem Trump is confronting as he tries to push through reforms. It’s not that Congress opposes these reforms. It’s that their paymasters oppose the reforms. He’s dealing with flunkies and errand boys. We don’t need a Solon right now. We need a Peisistratos.

The Russian Stain

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During the Cold War, popular culture portrayed the Soviets in two ways, often at the same time. There was the ruthless ideologue, efficiently going about his business as an implacable enemy of freedom. The other type of Soviet character was the morally conflicted guy, whose honor compelled him to serve his country, but he also understood that communism was immoral. As far as villains go, both types of Soviet were given a lot of respect, mostly because liberals in Hollywood were sympathetic to Bolshevism.

Today, Hollywood never uses Russians as bad guys, but our political class sees them as the epicenter of evil in the modern world. Steve Sailer noted the other day that the pundit class has rewritten recent history to fit this narrative. The neocons are celebrating the tenth anniversary of something that never really happened, at least not in the way they currently tell it. In addition to the former neocon puppet Mikheil Saakashvili, we have Robert Kagan and here is Condoleezza Rice repeating the same whopper.

The funny thing about this myth-making is that it is unnecessary. The number of people in the political class who could locate South Ossetia is a very small number. Most normal Americans would be puzzled to learn that there is a country named after the peach state. As a public relations item, this ten year old non-event is useless. There’s also the fact that the actual events are easily accessible on-line. It looms large for the neocons, though, so they can’t stop thinking about it. In fact, they seem to be haunted by it.

The neocons have been mucking about in that part of the world for a long time. Some would say their interests go back to the pale of settlement days. That’s an amusing theory, but probably not very accurate. Still, there’s pretty good evidence that the American foreign policy establishment has been meddling in the region since the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The Boston Marathon bomber was probably recruited by US intelligence at some point. His uncle seems to know a lot of people in the CIA.

The thing that no one has yet to explain is why has the American ruling elite become fixated on Russia. Even if the reason for the neocon obsession is ancient hatreds, why is the America Left nuts about the Russians? It could simply be convenience, but there are better villains in the world for them to hate, at least in practical terms. China, for example, makes for a much better villain, given their economic and military status. Iran or Saudi Arabia work much better with the Left’s current deep dive into matriarchy.

Even if you want to believe that the Left has been infected by the ancient hatred that allegedly animates the neocons, the tenor of the Left’s hatred of the Russians is completely different. The neocons see Russia as a problem to be controlled so it does not revert back to its imperial habits. The Left now sees Russia as the manifestation of all that opposed the great Progressive project. Russia is not a problem to be managed. The very existence of Russia is seen as an affront to the neo-liberal world order.

This visceral hatred has some similarities to the Progressive loathing of the imperial governments of Europe prior to the Great War. Wilson and his people despised the old order, which is why they were so aggressively vengeful toward the Austrians and Germans after the war. American Progressives seem to have developed the same view of Russia and to a lesser degree the Visegrad counties. Their resistance to the neo-liberal order is viewed as an ideological challenge and that can never be tolerated.

The difference is that a century ago, Wilsonian democracy was ascendant, while the monarchical order was in decline. America and American leaders were the new kids on the world stage, pushing aside the old guard. Today, the neo-liberal order is in a defensive crouch, under assault from biological reality and populist revolts. Meanwhile, Russia and Eastern Europe are pretty much just normal countries. Perhaps part of the hatred for Russia is the need to find something to blame for the current troubles in the West.

Of course, it is a reminder of the absolute intolerance of secular religions. When people assign the natural order to divine forces, they can be indifferent to alternative forms of worship, as a part of the great mystery of life. When the natural order is a man made creation and  the moral code is created and maintained by man, any deviation must be viewed as a challenge to the creator’s legitimacy. The stubborn existence of European countries practicing the old ways is an insult to the neo-liberal creators.

There also may be the issue of reach. Russia is poor and relatively weak compared to the West, but it remains out of reach culturally and politically. It’s ability to thrive outside the new world order suggests the new world order cannot include the whole world. Central to the liberal impulse, going back to Wilson, has been the notion that it must conquer the globe. Russia is like a stain that they cannot get out of the fabric of global society. Putin is a new Tsar, the return of that same stubborn problem they cannot resolve.

The Great Awakening

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Ron Unz has gotten back to writing and he has put out a handful of long columns under the American Pravda category. These are posts where he digs into the official narrative on some subject and his experience with discovering the truth. They are packed with lots of well researched information about the topic, often from obscure sources that have been erased from the official narrative. To his credit, he digs into the credibility of his source material, as to why they have been deliberately forgotten. That’s always useful.

I find them a bit too long, but that may be a matter of taste. There is something about reading from a screen that makes long articles less pleasant for me. People have looked into this and found that shorter is better than longer on-line. It’s one reason the long form essay is going away. Most people consume their content on-line, so they prefer short pithy articles. There’s also the fact that most of this stuff is read at work, where you steal a few minutes to read something before lunch or on a break. But, that’s a small quibble.

Anyway, this entry on post-war Europe was really interesting. The post-liberation reprisals in France and Belgium get some mention in the official narrative, but almost exclusively with regards to women who slept with German soldiers. The gang-like warfare between communists and their enemies is never mentioned. Of course, there is never any mention of what happened to many German soldiers in prisoner of war camps. War is an ugly business and ideological war is the ugliest. so the post-war was no picnic.

In regards to the ideological aspects of it, the blind hatred of the Germans by the American elite is never discussed. That’s why no one learns about the Morgenthau Plan in their history classes. It is another example of how ideological enemies cannot see the humanity in one another. The rage-fueled Progressives of America were no different than their moral predecessors, the abolitionists. They came to see the other side as the pure expression of evil and wanted them exterminated. The Morgenthau Plan was about genocide.

The most interesting part of theses posts is that they fit into the “red pill” experience you hear from many who journey to this side of the divide. Not everyone makes the journey, as they were always here, but did not know there was a “here.” Many do have a moment when the light went on and they either began to question their view of the world or simply changed their mind about some important item. Often, it is a book or article that is the triggering event. In that regard, these posts are a good addition to the catalog.

Of course, none of his posts would be possible without modern technology. When the only store of knowledge was controlled by the people running the official narrative, there was no way to “red pill” anyone or be red-pilled yourself. Unless you found a stash of old books that had been proscribed, you had to accept the official narrative at face value. Whatever happens in these troubled times, the fact that the society that produced the technological revolution could be consumed by it suggests nature in the long run, is self-correcting.

Reading the article on post-war Europe, I was reminded of something that often gets forgotten. That is, it is not enough to undermine the moral legitimacy of the prevailing orthodoxy. That phony narrative sold to us is not just propaganda in support of the current order, it gives Americans a reason to feel patriotic. It makes us proud of who we are as currently defined by the people in charge. Learning that it is a lie is like like learning that you were adopted. It leaves a hole and something must fill it. Something will fill it.

While undermining the moral authority of the people in charge is a big part of our project, we also have to work on a replacement. It’s not enough to get people wise to the hypocrisy of the New York Times, for example, with regards to race. They Sarah Jeong fiasco does red-pill  a lot of people, but that only matters if they have something else to embrace. In the movie from which the term “red-pill” originates, the characters had an alternative vision of their future. Without that, they would have had no reason to take the red pill.

This is the lesson of the Great War. The collapse of the monarchical system left a giant void in Europe. That system had been discredited, but there was not a replacement for the people to embrace. Liberal democracy had yet to evolve the secular morality to justify it, so into the void flowed Marxism and Fascism. The twentieth century was the fight between liberal democracy, fascism and communism, with the result being the neo-liberal order we have today. The lesson is that what comes next is not better by default.

The posts on antisemitism will be of some interest, especially to the JQ’ers. Ron is Jewish, so he comes to the subject from a different angle than the anti-Semites, but he is refreshingly frank about the material. It’s  good reminder that Jews are not the monolith JQ people need to believe. There are a lot of alt-Jews out there. It’s not a majority or even close to one, but it is a substantial minority. Their fight within the Jewish community over Jewish identity is a mirror of what is happening within the Occident.

It’s a good reminder that even if you embrace the fact that human diversity requires separation, it does not mean hostility. In fact, diversity requires cooperation in order for peaceful separation to work. Even though one group may have different interests and a radically different sense of identity than another, they can still cooperate with one another where their interests align. For the JQ people who think they have taken the ultimate red-pill, this understanding about cooperation and diversity is the ultimate red-pill.

I’m fond of pointing out that much of what defines the modern age is that everyone forgot the timeless lessons of the human condition and now we have to rediscover them. This great awakening we see on our side of the great divide is, in many respects, a rediscovery of the past. So much has been hidden from view in order to prop up the current regime, it’s shocking to most people. Like that kid who learns his parents had lied to him and he was adopted, what matters next is what we do with this new knowledge.

Waiting For The Spark

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I was at lunch last week when I overheard a couple of young women talking about the coming revolution. I thought it was a joke, at first, so I eavesdropped for a little while and sure enough, they were talking about revolution. The bossy looking one was going on about something Trump did, I missed that part, and how it was going to be the thing that “woke people up about what’s happening.” My guess is the part I missed had something to do with Russians or maybe the Manafort Trial. The Left is obsessed with that now.

Since the election, the Left has been dreaming up scenarios in which the results of the election are overturned. For a long time they were sure Trump would be impeached, but that seems to have faded. Last year my left-wing office manager was deep into the impeachment scenarios. Now the talk is of revolution, which probably fits better with their conception of themselves as the heroic resistance. They imagine Trump as a strong man, against whom they must resist until the system cracks, and then the revolution begins.

Most of us think of revolution in the sense of people flooding into the streets to protest the government. Either the government makes an error, causing the mob to turn violent or radicals use unrest to foment a full-on revolt. The two models in the Western mind are the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. Given the make up of the anti-Trump forces, it’s hard to imagine either scenario. The “resistance” is mostly girls and non-whites prone to committing violence against one another. It’s hard to see them leading a revolt.

There is a another model of revolution, that may be what our current rulers have in mind for us. That is the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Zedong fifty years ago. This was a revolution from above, where the revolutionary elite enlisted the masses at the bottom to purge the middle of bourgeois traitors to the proletariat. Mao purged the party of rivals and then used subsequent protests to advance a lurch into radicalism. The complaints about party leaders and administrators were an excuse to start a cultural revolution.

The most famous aspect of it was the Red Guards. This was a student movement aimed at unleashing “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a deeper and more extensive stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country.” Sinophiles hate the comparison, but this sounds a lot like our billionaire class financing the various radical groups and social justice warriors we see rampaging through the culture today. We are not being sent to the rice paddies yet, but there is still time.

Another point of comparison is the war on the “Four Olds” which were old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. This was both a war on the past, as well as a war on the culture itself. For example, the Red Guards pulled the remains of a Ming dynasty emperor out of his tomb, denounced him and then burned the remains. They went around renaming streets and toppling statues. This should strike a familiar cord. Today’s radicals do the same thing and preach against racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism.

No historical comparison is perfect. Again, Sinophiles really hate the comparison, but people are conservative about what they think they know best. There’s also the fact that Chinese culture is remarkably strong and it was largely able to resist the ten year campaign to obliterate it. American culture appears to be brittle and falling apart under the weight of a fifty year planned invasion of aliens hostile to the founding stock. The Chinese did not fill up their lands with hostile foreigners, armed with a ballot by the ruling class.

On the other hand, there are limits to everything. As the outrages from the Left stack up, the average white person in American grows more angry. Talk to anyone sympathetic to this line of thinking and they will tell you they have grown far less tolerant of their remaining liberal friends. I know I’ve lost touch with quite a few former friends, because I will not tolerate their nonsense. I have friends who just a few years ago thought Ben Shapiro was edgy and now think the alt-right is too soft. There is a reaction brewing in the country.

The question is what would it take to move people from yelling at their televisions over the latest liberal outrage to marching in the streets. This is never easy to know. Sometimes, the smallest spark sets of the biggest fire. The reaction to Alex Jones getting purged from the internet has been surprising, given that he is not a serious person. I got questions from people, who never heard of him until yesterday, angry over his banishment. My guess is the percentage of people thinking fondly of Pinochet is at an all-time high right now.

As far as the spark, a move against Trump is good bet. The glue that keeps things from flying apart right now is middle-class white people, who still have faith in the political system. These are the middle American radicals Sam Francis wrote about 30 years ago during the Reagan moment. They will tolerate just about anything, as long as they think they can fight the other side within the system. An effort to remove Trump or even silence his advocates, could be a spark that gets these people into the streets.

Extra-political efforts to ban guns are another possible spark. The coordinated efforts to cut off gun makers from the financial system is not unnoticed by the 2A people. They follow this stuff and there are a lot of them. The pink pussy hat people think they have numbers because billionaires will bus fifty thousand of them into DC. The NRA could get a million people in the streets if there is ever a real threat to gun rights. A big part of gun culture is the idea of the patriot bravely taking up arms to resist tyranny.

It is tempting to think this will all blow over. I was in the camp until recently. Now, I just don’t see how it will ever be possible to make peace with the Left. They hate us and will use any means necessary.The lack of code is the critical part. How does one make peace with someone that will never abide by the rules? Whether this results in revolution, counter revolution or civil war is hard to know, but the number of people thinking the gap cannot be bridged is growing every day. Now we wait for the Cossak’s wink.

Ghosts and Goblins

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Thirty years ago, everyone knew what it meant to be a liberal. They wanted to tax the rich and spend the proceeds on the poor. They wanted to regulate business so they could not exploit their workers or harm the environment. That meant favoring unions in the law. On foreign policy, liberals were the doves when it came to dealing with the Soviets. Of course, everyone knew what being a liberal meant when it came to social issues. The point being, liberalism was a well defined list of policy positions and opinions.

Today, what it means to be a liberal is a complete mystery, even to the people who proudly say they are on the Left. The Netroots Nation was this weekend, so all of the grandees of Progressivism were in New Orleans to pitch their ideas. Take a look at the agenda. Other than the promises to oppose Trump, most of it focused on building traffic for their websites. “Digital Security For Organizers Of Color” sounds amusing, but mostly because it has that familiar paranoia that has come to define the modern Left.

If you bother to watch any of the speeches, the tone is what you would expect from people facing the end times. One after another it was a rallying call for the fight against some monster, real or imagined. At least the ranting about Trump includes a real person, even if the bill of indictment is insane. When you think about it, the Russian collusion business is just an updated version of “cavorting with the devil.” Their argument is that Trump made a deal with the evil one, who magically altered the outcome of the 2016 election.

That’s what liberalism is these days. It is a weird collection of superstitions about various ghosts and goblins like racism and white privilege. Racism no longer means prejudice against another race or even antagonism toward another race. Racism is the evil spirit that is somehow responsible for unequal outcomes. White privilege is just another name for the same mysterious force. It’s how millionaire black athletes can be victims of racism because the white middle class fans stop watching them over the anthem protests.

Another aspect of this is the extreme paranoia. Listen to the Left these days and you get the impression America is now the movie The Purge. The faithful spend every night in their bunker homes. Here is a story from Breitbart about Bill Maher claiming that the United States is turning into Iraq. He does not mean the post-war Iraq. He means the the Saddam version where his Al-Bu Nasir tribe ruled over the nation. In Maher’s version, Trump, the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch rule over Maher’s oppressed majority.

Now, Maher is a cynical provocateur and opportunist. He was a hack comic for a long time until he figured out how to stoke the fears and fantasies of liberal fanatics. It is debatable as to how much he believes any of the stuff he says. In this case, he is clearly trying to appeal to his audience, by naming three hobgoblins of the Left. The fact that Charles Koch despises Trump and Murdoch was a Hillary supporter makes his theory as nutty as the Russian hacking nonsense, but his audience is not rational.

This vision of themselves as the put upon minority is integral to Progressive identity politics. Not only do the constituencies needs to believe they are victims, the Judeo-Puritan project is rooted in a bunker mentality. Their sense of the world is of a righteous people holed up in a New England town, as the imperial forces encircle them, while they pray the oil holds out until the golem arrives to free them. It is a dogs breakfast of both spiritual and mythological strains that make up modern Progressivism.

Again, Maher does this because he knows his audience is stupid and this stuff works on them, but it speaks to something about the modern Left. Conventional conservatives like the go on about how the Left has no ideas now. That is true in the nuts and bolts public policy sense. The Left is no longer a political force. It’s made the turn and is on its way to becoming the Cult of the Supreme Being. Unlike Robespierre’s invention, this version is esoteric, mysterious and oriental. There is no defined supernatural, just a sense of it.

It’s also very feminine. The hysterical shrieking about the hobgoblins that haunt the Left is reminiscent of the old Blondie cartoons, where the woman would stand on a chair shrieking about a mouse in the kitchen. In a more sophisticated age, the readers knew that the woman’s performance was just that, a performance. It was an acting out and reinforcement of traditional sex roles. Today, when the Progressive climbs onto her chair and shrieks, there is no mouse and no man to rush in and comfort her. It’s a lonely act.

This collapse of Progressivism into a feminine mystery cult is why conventional conservatism has collapsed. Conservatism was never a genuine alternative. Their role was as a foil to the Left. That worked as long as Progressives had a policy agenda, but that is not longer the case. Listen to the leading figures of the Left and their policy proposals range from comically ridiculous to vaguely aspirational. Again, you see the feminization. The Bernie Bros are now Bernie gals like Ocasio-Cortez and Sarah Smith.

What this says about what comes next is hard to know. Spiritual movements are a part of the human condition. Anthropologists think belief is one of the earliest modern human traits, co-evolving with language. As Christianity fades in the West, something must replace it. Maybe we are seeing the birth of the next great religion. Alternatively, the ranting and raving against nature could be the death howls of a culture that has reached its terminal point. The end is a people huddled in darkness, afraid of the goblins outside.

They Hate You

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The Sarah Jeong story has probably been the best thing to happen to our side since Trump came down that escalator. The challenge of this age is in convincing typical white people that it is not socialism they should fear, it is extermination. There are still people waddling around in their tricorn hats talking about the socialist menace. Mention race to them and they start hyperventilating about their constitutional principles. What the Sarah Jeong story does it make it impossible for the normies to avoid the elephant in the room.

It’s not so much that this Asian airhead hates white people. Blacks have been out in public talking about how much they hate white people since the Civil Rights era. Typical white person has been trained to accept this, by assuming it is meaningless. Blacks are powerless, so their hatreds are no threat. Then you have the subversives like Ben Shapiro telling them that black hatred of whites is really bad for blacks because it keeps them from showing up at CPAC every year to take selfies with adoring white people.

Asians are supposed to be different. They are the model minority. Typical white people just assume that Asians are on their side. They work hard. They avoid crime and social dysfunction. They come here looking for a chance, give their kids nice names like Sarah and send them off to good colleges. You’ll note that you never hear anyone suggest we should end immigration from Asia. In the blossoming race war, Asians are never in the discussion, because white people just assume they are on the side of Team Whitey.

All of a sudden one of the model minority has revealed that she hates white people as much as the black street hustler. Even more disturbingly, the people known for eating dogs apparently think white people smell like dogs. It adds a whole new element to what the coalition of non-whites has in mind for us once they get total control. More important, this white hating Asian migrant is defended by so-called conservatives. Ben Shapiro wore his tiny little fingers raw tweeting out defenses of the Times decision to back Jeong.

The initial response from typical white people was to celebrate Progressive values by howling about the racism. When that went nowhere, they moved onto howling about the hypocrisy. When the response from the Left was to laugh in their face, white people were forced to face reality. The other side is not a bunch of socialists. They are a coalition of non-whites and some traitors, who are held together by a hatred of white people and the fantasy of a non-white world. They hate white people. That’s it.

Normie white people will try hard to rationalize it and force themselves back into the comfortable role of doormat to the Left, but the scales will fall from the eyes of many whites. Many may have already come to terms with the reality, but it is the behavior of people like Ben Shapiro that is the eye-opener. The guy who recently said racists should be hounded out of their jobs, is now defending Jeong and the New York Times, either from a position of solidarity or out of craven opportunism.

Another aspect of this is that it undercuts the argument made by conventional conservatives about their vaunted principles. The other side has no rules and they have no intention of limiting themselves with rules. All the breast-beating about racism was a lie and it always was a lie. Since the Left controls the moral framework, they have just taken the first step toward normalizing tribalism. Compared to Sarah Jeong, Richard Spencer is a naive one-world idealist. Jared Taylor is now Ben Shapiro’s moral superior.

This story also offers a chance to point out to white people that there is no bargaining with these people. A bargain requires a degree of good faith on both sides and some way to hold the both sides to the deal. The Left thinks it has a moral duty to do whatever is necessary to destroy the rest of us, so they are not just allowed to break the rules and lie about it. They are morally obligated to use any means necessary to win, which is why they named one of the activist groups By Any Means Necessary.

Now, white people have been finding ways to roll over and play dead for a long time, so this event will not suddenly turn them into identitarians. Whites have a habit of internalizing each Progressive outrage. It’s important to remind the normie white person in your life that the other side never quits, They can never be shamed into giving up on their goals. They lost over 30 votes on homosexual marriage, but kept at it until they won one and then got the courts to enshrine homosexual marriage as a founding principle.

If you think the defense of Sarah Jeong by subversives like Ben Shapiro is an end point, you are mistaken. Now that they have established that it is OK to hire virulent antiwhites, the next step will be the firing of whites because the antiwhites find them upsetting. In other words, the presence of whites will be grounds to claim the workplace is hostile to non-whites, so the whites have to be fired. How long before Justice Roberts writes the majority opinion claiming the Founders always wanted whites to be non-citizens?

The Great Questioning

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A popular topic among the members of the alt-right is the red pill moment. This is the event or experience that opened the person’s eyes to some reality. In the case of the alt-right, it’s more often the JQ they have in mind, but it can be race or even just politics. I’ve talked to many people flying the alt-right flag, who came from libertarianism. The campaign of Ron Paul seems to have turned many people into dissidents. My bet is the biggest source of recruits into the Dissident Right is libertarianism, followed by Buckley Conservatism.

Something I’ve noticed about the world of dissident politics is it is increasingly cut-off from mainstream conservatism and maybe politics in general. I know in my own case, I stopped watching Sunday chat shows twenty years ago and stopped watching cable chat shows in the Bush years. About five years ago, when I started blogging, I stopped reading mainstream conservative sites. I still check in on National Review or the Weekly Standard once in a while, but I can’t remember the last time I found anything relevant.

It’s not that people on our side of the great divide are ghettoized, there is some of that, but that conventional politics no longer seems relevant. Progressive assaults on speech get a lot of discussion, but this barely registers in the mainstream political chatter. The far left media doxxing people gets some attention, but again, that never gets discussed in mainstream circles. Otherwise, the old time fights between “conservatives” and “liberals” that used to define politics seem to have lost all relevance to our side.

It’s hard to know about these things. In my daily life, I meet some people who think like me and mostly people on the far left. Friends will mention Tucker Carlson on occasion, but I can’t remember the last time someone mentioned Hannity to me or Rush Limbaugh. Yet, the former is the top cable talker and the latter remains the top radio talker. In other words, my perspective on these things could be warped by the fact that I spend my time reading dissident right web sites and following hate-thinkers on social media. I could be the weirdo.

That said, I can’t remember the last time a liberal friend or acquaintance mentioned someone on the conventional right. It’s all Trump and his secret allegiance with Putin for them. To a lesser degree they obsess over people like me and our plans to bring back slavery, roll back women’s rights and turn America into a medieval fortress. As a rule, the American Left has always obsessed over that which it sees as a genuine threat or that which is a mirror held up to them, forcing them to examine their own beliefs.

Anyway, this is a long wide up to something I was sent the other day. This piece by Michael Anton in the Claremont Review of Books is a long response to something in The Federalist. Apparently, the two writers are having a dispute about the social contract and how it is defined in America. The best I can tell, the Federalist guy is a NeverTrump loon still angry at Anton over his “Flight 93” article. Robert Tracinski appears to be a Rip Van Winkle sort of guy, struggling to come to terms with modern America.

There was a time, maybe, when a debate over social contract theory and its relevance to American politics, would have been interesting to me. Today, it seems about as relevant as a debate over the proper way to saddle a unicorn so Sasquatch can ride it without falling off. Like the state of nature model, popular with Enlightenment philosophers, we know without a doubt that there is no such thing as a social contract. The current American conception of it is most certainly nonsense. America is not an idea.

That’s a point I often write about here and others take up in other places. It’s not the conclusions of liberal democracy that are the problem. it is the premise of it. When you start from the social contract and the state of nature, the conclusion is inevitable. That’s the problem with liberal democracy. It can only lead to one end and that is the obliteration of culture, which is what defines a people. Once the culture dies, the people soon follow, which explains the falling fertility rates, marriage rates and the migrant invasions.

Now, the point of this post, if there is one, is not to argue for or against any particular conception of the social contract. It’s just an example of the growing divide between those in dissident politics and those who remain trapped in conventional politics. The project on our side is to ask how it is we have arrived at this point and to then question the premises upon which is built the old order. For example, if the natural order is not a voluntary agreement among men, then what is it and what would a modern version of it resemble?

The great divide may not simply be a dispute about the nature of man. That’s certainly a big part of what separates a reader here and a reader at Reason, National Review or The Nation. The one side embraces the diversity of man, while the other embraces the blank slate The difference also extends to topics that have long been considered axiomatic. As we seem to be heading into a denouement of the long Calvin – Rousseau dynamic, many of us are questioning the foundations of the liberal order and the Enlightenment itself.

The Corporatist Enterprise

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Fascism is word that no longer has a useful meaning, mostly because the Left has made it the catchall term for anything they currently oppose. Even adjusting for that, no two academics can agree on a usable definition of fascism. Paul Gottfried, who has studied the subject more than anyone alive today, makes the point that fascism was a lot of different things, even to its advocates. It was an anti-movement, a reaction to and rejection of things like modernity, left-wing radicalism and bourgeois sensibilities of the age.

That’s not a fair rendering of Gottfried’s thoughts on the subject, but it is a useful starting point when thinking about the historical fascism. The book Fascism: The Career of a Concept is an excellent entry point into a topic for those interested in a sober minded history of fascism. An aspect of fascism that rarely gets discussed in the current age is its corporatism. Fascists, particularly Italian fascists, were strongly corporatist. Mussolini saw the state as something like an organism that transcended all institutions.

The most famous expression of this is the line from Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism, “everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state.” The state not only provides the services expected of government, it provides the spiritual purpose for those in the state. The individual exists only in so far as his interests as an individual correspond with the interests of the state. The state is an organism that transcends individual consciousness such that the individual is entirely defined by his role within it.

This is often used as the description of totalitarianism, but that’s not a very accurate comparison. Bolshevism, for example, was indifferent to the spiritual life of the citizen, only focusing on the political and material life. That’s the striking thing about Italian fascism versus Marxist movements. It attempted to give purpose to the life of the citizen, beyond his material utility. Instead of viewing the citizen as an economic unit, fascism saw the citizen as a heroic part of the great struggle of the state against materialism.

Whiffs of this spiritual appeal can be seen in the modern managerial state. Politics is becoming all consuming. You cannot watch a movie or sporting event without being barraged with messages about “who we are.” Everything is cast as part of the great struggle. Trump sounds like an anachronism, because he talks about bread and butter issues, while the rest of the managerial elite focuses on esoteric topics like “who we are” and “our democracy.” By democracy, they mean the managerial system and culture.

It also  shows up in the modern conception of the business enterprise. It’s not enough to have a job. It must give purpose to your life. It must be part of the great struggle that helps you reach your potential in service to the great cause. You see that in this story about a pseudo-company that has forced its employees to embrace vegetarianism. Read about the company and it he sounds like a religious mission. It used to be that businessmen only wanted to make money. Now all of them publish a manifesto and advocate a lifestyle.

It’s why rank and file employees of new style companies like Constant Contact feel the need to moralize from their cubicle. The young women doing this is not merely a bonehead functionary. She sees herself as committed to the cause of the company, which is a holy cause. It is not a place where she performs tasks for money. It is what defines her life as a person. Led by tech, the managerial enterprise is not just an employer to its hired help. It is the defining feature of their lives. Their job is to reach their potential as a person.

The historian Ernst Nolte described one aspect of fascism as “theoretical transcendence” which he called a metapolitical force. Fascism sought to go beyond what exists in this world, toward a new future that was free of the restraints on the human mind. It imagined a world that was free of class, poverty, ignorance and material restraint. That’s what the modern managerial enterprise preaches to its employees and customers. They are not just selling a service. They are changing the world, freeing us from this misery.

The bizarre nature of the modern enterprise, where it describes itself as a mission to change the world, is one result democracy. Democracy obliterates local institutions, leaving the citizen as a stranger to himself and his fellow citizens. The corporation fills this void by providing a structured environment where the employees share an identity and see one another as on the same team. The managerial enterprise becomes both the local community and the church for its people. It’s what provides them purpose and meaning.

The trouble is that a business is first and foremost about making a profit. Social activism keeps running up against the profit motive. Short of state sanctioned monopoly power, the corporate enterprise must compromise its values in order to make a profit. This is why democracy must favor monopoly. You see this with media companies, where the government encourages collusion and combination. You see it with Amazon. Everywhere it operates, it enjoys massive subsidies, as it obliterates all other forms of retail.

This back and forth between the growing cultural power of the corporation, but its greater dependence on the state for protection, results in a merging of the two. Walk around a government campus and you see the trappings of the modern corporations. College presidents now call themselves CEO’s, not because the college has become a business, but because both are now part of the great mission. The line between the state and the private sphere no longer exists, because it can’t exist for both sides to thrive.

This is why gun grabbers, for example, have turned to corporations to advance their agenda. The state failed to ban guns, so now banks, media companies and retail monopolists are stepping in to “solve” the problem. In the not so distant future, you will have the unfettered political right to carry a gun, but no one will sell guns because it is practically impossible. No “private” enterprise will do business with a gun maker or a gun retailer. Individual rights are worthless in a world where there are no individuals.